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Otaku Defined
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Resent-Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 05:31:08 -0500
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Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 07:45:22 +0000
To: "Lord Myren" <[email protected]>, [email protected]
From: David Phelan <[email protected]>
Subject: [WAY OFF TOPIC] Otaku Defined (was Re: Japanese Technomads )
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At 13:16 25/11/1998 PST, Lord Myren wrote:
<snip>
>Otaku is translated from japanese meaning "fan." This is a somewhat
>flawed translation in that there is no way to transfer the powerful
>connotative meaning.
>
<snip>
>Unfortunately, I believe something was lost in the translation in the
>article. Otaku is rarely used in refence to things other than anime.
>This article may have failed the translation or may just be a minor
>mislabeling. Otaku can be used in reference to things other than anime,
>however it is rarely ever so.
>From a no-longer online magazine called JapanInterface (used to be at
http://www.php.co.jp/japaninface/):
Nerds of a Feather
Defining OTAKU
by Bill Marsh
IN TOKYO a recently arrived friend calls, wants to know daishikyu (ASAP,
yesterday) what otaku means. He's just been told by a mutual acquaintance
that no serious student of contemporary Japan could possibly not know this
word-yet his Japanese accuser, when
asked to define otaku, refuses even to try.
It isn't easy.
Once upon a time, this word-which taken alone translates as "[your]
honorable house"-was no more than an obsequious, laboriously indirect way
to say "you" or "you and yours." Snobs and bluestockings will use it, but
there's nothing inherently sinister about the
expression. The story doesn't end there.
Japan has long produced bumper crops of korekuta ("collectors" of rare
stamps, cars, etc) and mania (folks with a "mania" for Beatles bootlegs,
etc) who gather at conventions to compare notes and stockpiles. Haughty yet
insecure, many greet each other by asking, Otaku wa nani o nasatteru desu
ka? This fastidious formula for inquiring "What're you into?" or "What's
your thing?" became a trademark, prompting trend-watchers to smugly label
them otaku-zoku (nerd tribes).
Enter Tsutomu Miyazaki, arrested in 1989 and eventually charged with the
abduction and murder of four little girls. Here was a man capable of
videotaping himself cutting up a dead child and sending her bones, the
video, and photos of her sandals and clothes to the
victim's parents in a cardboard box. When a search of his premises
uncovered an eclectic collection of 5,000 videotapes, the image of otaku as
benign, shy dorks disintegrated.
Surprise! Japan's police and media, used to playing to the crowd and
blandly riding herd on the occasional misfit, discovered during the
affluent 1980s that their grip on a population easily tamed by fears of
what the neighbors might think was slipping. Popping up all over were
intense, asocial creatures on very private missions for very private gods.
Shunning contact with all but their brethren in obsession, they sent to
o-mawari-san (the neighborhood cops who in Japan regularly "check up" on
each household) a silent but clear message: Nothing personal, but what I'm
into is the kind of thing you and people like you would never understand.
Are otaku garden-variety nerds? Psychopaths? Undesirables? What otaku
connotes depends on who you ask. Example: A producer friend recently
berated his director on an NHK project for shooting from otaku camera
angles. The point? He wanted to make a TV program for general audiences,
not film-school coteries.
The foreword to the superb but dated (1989) Otaku no hon (The Otaku Book,
published by JICC) argues that otaku are strictly a post-1980 phenomenon,
not the latest gimmick in the ephemeral parade of zoku (tribes) that
postwar youth-culture reportage has
served up. Their break with the values of seken (the "real world," as the
editor parenthetically labels it in English) is not a byproduct of kodoku
(isolation) or seijuku (adolescence). Rather, otaku desire to dokuji no
sekai ni chujitsu ni ikiru (live faithfully in their own world) and find a
ba (place, outlet) to meet others who onaji genso o kyoyu suru (share the
same fantasy).
The editor offers the example of the rorikon (otaku with a "Lolita
complex"): deeply unwilling to become men (i.e., husbands and salarymen),
they partake instead of kyodo genso (communal fantasy) via comic books
about kaku no bi-shojo (imaginary beautiful
girlchildren). Their female equivalents in ambivalence are the yaoi-zoku,
girls hooked on perverted, plotless, sexually explicit parodies of
conventional comics about the friendship between cute boys. Obviously
neither homosexual nor homophobic, both groups
prefer the chaste option of onani (onanism) to the perceived compromises of
marital consummation.
Otaku no hon presents an amazing variety of strategies for sidestepping the
social compact. Even familiar types like hakka ("hackers"), gema ("gamers,"
computer game freaks), or aidorian ("idol-ians," who fixate on singing
idols) seem more over the top
than their American counterparts. Others, like kamera-kozo ("li'l camera
monks" who sneak crotch shots with concealed strobe cameras) and akushon
banda ("action banders" devoted to cracking officially "secure" radio and
computer systems), aggressively court risks to enact their pranks.
Whatever their stripe, the otaku are out there in droves, rifling through
the latest aniparoetchimangadojinshi
(animation-parody-pervert-comic-connoisseur-mag) at the corner bookstore,
terrified that any minute they'll be eaten alive by common
sense.
from Pop Japanese, Bill Marsh's ongoing column in MANGAJIN magazine
Hope that is useful
Dave Ph
--------------------------------------------------------------
Dave Phelan [email protected]
CCIE# 3590 http://freepages.pavilion.net/users/dphelan
"Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the
situation." -- Edward R. Murrow
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Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'